On Fridays I'm posting my thoughts on Lou Reed's solo albums, one album at a time in chronological order of release. Today's post on "Street Hassle" goes out to Twitter friend @KateVenne

Fr. Robert Boyle, the late Marquette University English professor, used to assign students papers in which they took a single word from a story or a piece of a novel and explain how the word worked in that literature. In essence, he asked us to use the word as a portal into the whole work, or as a fractal that somehow embodied that piece of literature. | Jan. 10, 2014»Read Full Blog Post

Set against a backdrop of the Jazz Age, Judith Mackrell's "Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation" explores the lives of creative, prominent women who, after the devastation of World War I, took advantage of the era's "spirited audacity" to "reinvent themselves."

"The war had delivered voting rights and jobs to many, and it had started to redraw new social maps," writes Mackrell. A new breed of women emerged with the credo: "to live as I liked, always and to die in my own way." | Jan. 10, 2014»Read Full Article

No contemporary figure quite compares to Kate Chase Sprague, the protagonist of Jennifer Chiaverini's historical novel "Mrs. Lincoln's Rival." Social mores and the opportunities available to women have changed too much over the past century and a half. But imagine for a moment a widowed Bill Clinton campaigning for president, with his teenage daughter Chelsea as his secret consigliere, and you'll begin to grasp something of Chase Sprague's unusual role in American history.

Previously best known for her Elm Creek Quilts series, Madison novelist Chiaverini began a sequence of popular historical novels set during the Civil War last year with "Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker," based on Elizabeth Keckley, a free black businesswoman who became a confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln, and continued with "The Spymistress," inspired by Elizabeth Van Lew, who spied for the Union behind Confederate lines in Richmond, Va. In addition to simply being fascinating stories, these novels go a long way in capturing the texture of life for women, rich and poor, black and white, in those perilous years. | Jan. 10, 2014»Read Full Article(1)